Welcome to America 2.0

I just don't even know what to say anymore: Job seekers getting asked for Facebook passwords.

When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password.

Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn't want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no.

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person's social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

"It's akin to requiring someone's house keys," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it "an egregious privacy violation."

And it's not just applicants for new jobs who are being subjected to this brazen violation of privacy:

Robert Collins was returning to his job as a security guard at the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services after taking a leave following his mother's death. During a reinstatement interview, he was asked for his login and password, purportedly so the agency could check for any gang affiliations. He was stunned by the request but complied.

"I needed my job to feed my family. I had to," he recalled.

So it was hand over the password to his private account, or lose his job.

I know I'm a goddamn insufferable broken record, but this is why progressives cannot compromise on reproductive rights, or punt on same-sex marriage, or negotiate on trans* protections, or ignore police harassment of people of color, or abandon migrant workers to radicalized border agents, or cede one fucking centimeter on any issue having to do with bodily autonomy and privacy.

Over and over and over, encroachments on privacy have been treated as an acceptable sacrifice by privileged progressives, because those encroachments were being made on the bodies and lives of people who aren't politically powerful.

And oh noes it would make liberals look HYSTERICAL if they pandered to the needs and concerns of SPECIAL INTERESTS like women or people with disabilities or undocumented immigrants! Just settle down and stop yelling about how your body is being treated like property of the state so Democrats can get elected and keep letting it happen.

Well, here we are. Now your employer wants your password. And who's gonna stop them? This is America 2.0, where if we're not owned by the state, we're owned by a corporation, because negotiating away a principled position on privacy was considered a good political move.

Whoops.